Thursday, November 5, 2009

Crazy- Ass PC Loot Game Rampage

I'm living single for a couple of weeks since the wife has headed over to Japan ahead of myself to spend some time with friends and family. In the meantime, I've been reading a hell of a lot of The Gathering Storm, the new Wheel of Time book, and I've been playing a hell of a lot of some recent PC purchases.

Torchlight is just about perfect. It's a game very much in the Diablo tradition, and indeed made by a lot of the people behind the Diablo series, formerly of Blizzard North. It's a great refinement of the genre, and it's effortless to sit down and waste a couple of hours with the game. I'm playing a dual-pistol-wielding vanquisher with a trick-shot like ricochet ability, and having my pet concentrate on keeping enemies' attention while I blast them from range. The story is paper-thin, and it's single player only, but a game with this level of playability for $20 is madness.

Borderlands is often summed up as Diablo, but with guns. I'd just add that it's done in a brown GWAR junkyard setting. It's a pretty fun game, but the PC version has a lot of things that piss me off. It's just a straight case of shoehorning the console version onto a PC, with just about nothing added but enhanced graphics settings and mouse controls. The UI is atrocious, and the P2P networking over Gamespy is gutter trash. Despite these failings, I've spent like 10 hours playing the game, already. With a patch (or some tweaks I could pull off myself in the config files) the game could be something great. Go the extra mile, developers. You just look bad when you pull this shit.

Dawn of War II is a novel mix of RTS and Diabalike game conventions. It's the tactical gameplay of one with the more intimate scope and character and gear progression of the other. It's great, so far. I like the crazy Warhammer 40,000 universe it's set in, too. So far I've done 6-7 missions of the campaign, a match of the more traditional, base-builder RTS multiplayer, and several games of The Last Stand, which is the Horde/Firefight/survival mode done in DoW II. Very cool, so far.

Yakuza 2 has kind of fallen by the wayside for now, with me about halfway or more through it. I'm at a decent break point, though, and I'll probably be back at it either once I finish this book or once I'm back from Japan around Thanksgiving.

I enjoy listening to some of the metal you guys put at the beginning and end of each podcast!

I dug through some of my old metal album collection recently and listened to an obscure group called "Wicked Innocence". I thought you might find it interesting. Check out one of their songs at the link below.

The vocals can be comical at times but the drums and bass parts stand out.